The Shed That Fed a Million Children

by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

  Allison, Nyapthala and children all over the world were fund-raising for Mary’s Meals in extraordinary ways. Milona returned from a trip to Italy where she had been giving talks to our new fund-raising group. Gleefully, she told us how in Modena children were planting pumpkin seeds in a field near their school and after they had grown large and tasty, they were selling them to raise the funds that would mean another child in a faraway place might eat.

  In Brighton, meanwhile, a seven-year-old boy called Charlie Doherty began to tell his mum he did not want birthday presents and that instead he wanted her to give the money to Mary’s Meals. And then he began to fund-raise in other ways. He organized a group of friends to swim the length of a marathon, and, not content with that, persuaded his mum to do a sponsored cycle ride with him from their home on the south coast of England to Glasgow. Like Allison in Iowa, he then decided to sponsor a school in Malawi and, in time, raised the funds required to provide over 1,000 meals every day in a large school there.

  In 2012, perhaps the most spectacular example yet of a child leading a Mary’s Meals initiative began, when a nine-year-old girl called Martha Payne started a blog called Never Seconds, to write about her school dinners. She wrote her opinion on each meal in the format of a restaurant review, scoring it on its quality, health rating, number of hairs and marks out of ten based on a ‘Food-o-Meter’. Her blog began to gain a huge following and I first heard of Martha when her grandfather, a very committed and active Mary’s Meals volunteer in Edinburgh, asked if I might let Martha interview me, explaining that she was now using her blog to raise money to sponsor a school for Mary’s Meals. I agreed but explained it would need to wait until I returned from a trip I was about to make to America. A few days later Argyll and Bute Council, annoyed by what they saw as her criticism of their school meals, banned her from taking photographs of the food she was served at school. An enormous storm of protest and media interest ensued. The story went viral and overnight Martha became a global Internet star. All over the world, newspapers and TV stations picked up the story. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read about it in the New York Times. Before the council’s ban Martha had already raised about £2,000 for Mary’s Meals. A few days later that total stood at £130,000, and all over the world we had a new wave of supporters. Martha’s family took every opportunity to use the situation to support Mary’s Meals, telling the media if they wanted an interview they would need to include something on our work. In the following months, we were often asked by admiring marketing professionals from larger charities to explain to them the secret of how we had engineered this spectacular social media event. We had to explain that it had nothing to do with us. If only we were that clever! A few months later, it was a thrill to see a smiling young Martha travel to Malawi with her family in order to visit one of the schools where her funds were being used to provide meals – and the fact that the BBC went with them to make a documentary helped us gain even more supporters.

  Children were showing us how to fund-raise in all kinds of incredible ways, but the sheer speed of growth meant we desperately needed other kinds of help too. I had no experience of running a large organization. The numbers of staff were growing in proportion to the size of our work, but our determination to keep our overheads very low and our conviction that we should never pay high salaries meant we could not just go out and hire people who had years of senior management experience and qualifications that we were lacking. We prayed that God would send us some new helpers.

  We had just found a wonderful new board member called David Clayton, a former PwC partner, who later became our Chairman. I invited him to come to an international gathering in Medjugorje as a way for him to get to know the people involved in Mary’s Meals. He immediately accepted this invitation, but feeling a little nervous about visiting this place of ‘Catholic’ pilgrimage (David is a Scottish Presbyterian) he phoned an old friend to ask if he might join him. That old friend was Jim Kennedy, who indeed joined us in Medjugorje for the week. Just before we flew home, he asked to speak to me. He explained that he was recently retired from a long career working in very senior positions with Hewlett Packard and Compaq, and that his intention on retirement had been to give his time to help some charitable organizations. He now felt that rather than helping a number of organizations he wanted to devote his time to just one, Mary’s Meals. Having listened to the speakers during the week, he was on fire in regard to our mission and he could also see that we were in need of his help. Less than a week after our return from that conference, Jim made his first visit to my ‘shed’. We set up the flip chart and began to discuss priorities. For the first few months Jim mainly listened. He had a huge respect for the way we were doing things and wanted to be very cautious about introducing business methodologies that might be in conflict with our values and current systems. He had an incredibly sharp mind and began to help us enormously with the development of a senior management team, strategic planning and robust working practices. He would challenge my starting positions vigorously, but respectfully, in a way that I found extremely helpful, and all of us with positions of responsibility learnt things from him about the importance of rigour and attention to detail. For the next five years Jim, as an unpaid volunteer, worked as hard as any member of staff. Sometimes his serious, almost fierce, demeanour would suddenly dissolve into laughter for no apparent reason as he stood with his pen poised at the flip chart.

  ‘When I worked for Hewlett Packard we used to have a standard phrase if someone got a bit carried away and became over-ambitious in their thinking. We would say to them, “Calm down! We’re not trying to solve world hunger!”

  ‘And what am I doing now? Standing in this shed with you lot in front of this flip chart trying to do just that!’ he roared.

  Like Ruth, Milona and several others, Jim’s contribution made a huge lasting impact on the evolution of Mary’s Meals and the way we work. While Ruth developed much of our language and the particular way we articulate what we do, and Milona taught us much about how this work should be rooted in love always, Jim showed us how to be very effective stewards indeed with the resources entrusted to us. Sometimes those involved in our work, who believe in divine providence, are challenged and worried by the introduction of more planning and procedures and talk of strategies, but the ability to do these things well can be God’s gifts also, I believe. And so too are those people who make dramatic decisions in their lives to become part of this mission.

  10

  Reaching the Outcastes

  Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

  W. B. YEATS

  Out of the first rays of dawn, which streamed through the poplar trees and along the cobbled lane, some children appeared. In groups of three or four they came, wearing uniforms and carrying school bags. As they made their way past the little sugar-cane plant, some of them waved to their fathers, who were just finishing their night shift, before they continued on into their little school playground. Outside her mud-brick house on the edge of the lane, a mother was hurriedly trying to smooth her son’s hair with water as he frantically looked in his school bag for something. Finally he found it and ran out on to the lane to catch some passing friends. As I watched, I thought of Julie and my own children and our very similar routine at home. But then a horse trotted past, pulling a cart in which a man with a white turban stood holding the reigns. The morning had begun to unfold much like any other in Kuwakhera, a small, backwater village in Uttar Pradesh, north India. But for some that unfolding was not such a happy one.

  While the school bell rang and neat lines of pupils were forming in the playground for morning assembly, eleven-year-old Devand and his ten-year-old sister Gemina were just beginning their twelve-hour shift in the sugar-cane plant. They were the youngest members of a family of six who were all employed here. In a flat area behind the rickety old machines that noisily pulped the sugar canes to extract the sweet juice, the brother and sister started to spread the lef
tover shreds to dry in the hot sun and thus become fodder for local farmers. The adults who worked in this plant as casual labourers were being paid about 55 pence for each twelve-hour shift they worked, while the family of six were employed on a permanent basis and received a lump sum between them all.

  Behind the school, we walked into the fields where the sugar cane was being harvested and where more children were working while they should have been gaining an education and the possibility of an escape from poverty. Crouched among the stubble and tangle of cut cane, a young boy dressed in rags was gathering the stems into bundles. He was filthy and had a face as sad as I’ve ever seen. He was reluctant to talk to us. Perhaps he had never seen people with white skin before or perhaps he had not had a conversation for a very long time. But slowly, without lifting his eyes from the ground, he began to answer the questions posed by my Indian friend.

  His name was Kailu, he told us, and he was fourteen years of age. He came from a small village in the forests of Bihar.

  ‘We had elephants and we ate deer from the forest,’ he whispered when we asked about his village.

  Slowly he began to grow a little more confident, even raising his gaze to look at us.

  ‘I think I have been here for about six months. A “contractor” came to our village and recruited 200 boys. We were put on a train. I was taken to this village where a farmer paid the contractor £15 for me. He said he would deduct this from my wages. I have not been paid anything since I have been here.’

  By now he seemed happy to answer our questions.

  ‘I rise at 7 a.m. and I go to bed at midnight. I have not had a day off since I got here. After I finish in the fields I do household chores and I clean the cow sheds. But I am lucky because my master never beats me or abuses me. They give me two meals every day. I am not allowed in their kitchen so I eat them on my own. I have nothing apart from these clothes I am wearing.’

  I looked at his old top, jeans ripped at the knees, and his flimsy flip-flops.

  ‘Do you know anyone else here?’

  ‘I do not know anyone.’ And he turned to look at the school on the edge of the fields from where we could hear children’s laughter.

  ‘And do your parents know what your life is like here?’

  ‘No, I am not in contact with them. I cannot write and they cannot either. Our village is very poor – it is why they sent me away for work. I only saw a telephone once, in the railway station when I got off the train. Sometimes, when I think of my parents and my life here I sit and I cry.’ He was looking at the ground again.

  ‘Will you return home?’

  ‘Yes. After one year, on the feast of Holi, I will receive my year’s wages. I will go home and never return here,’ he replied.

  By now Kailu was looking anxiously across the fields towards some houses, worried that his master would arrive and see him talking to us. We took our leave. As we walked through the cane, I asked my companion, Father Joson, if he thought Kailu would ever receive any money for his work and whether he would even know how to get back home if he did. He shook his head sadly at both questions. I wonder if Mary’s Meals had been served in a school in Kailu’s village whether his parents would have made the same choices.

  It was 2004 and I was making my first visit to India. I had been introduced to Father Joson the previous year when he was working for some months in a Glasgow parish. He was from Kerala and was a trained lawyer as well as a priest. He had told me about his work in India with the Pragati Social Service Society, an organization that had been set up to serve the poor and marginalized. They worked mainly with Dalits, who make up more than 15 per cent of the population and who are deemed ‘untouchable’ by the caste system in India.

  Although discrimination according to caste was now illegal in India, the caste system which had evolved over thousands of years still pervaded every aspect of life in the rural areas. The kind of job you had, the people you associated with, your access to the village water pump – all these things could be decided by which caste you had been born into. The Dalits continued to be oppressed, enslaved and humiliated as they carried out the tasks that no one else in society wanted to do. They worked with bare hands among the rubbish, they disposed of human waste and they worked as ‘human donkeys’, pulling heavy loads. They often became bonded labourers. (‘Bonded’ refers to those who have fallen into debt to a landowner who deducts repayments from their wages and for whom they are obliged to work until the debt is paid off. Those landowners normally charge extremely high interest rates and often, when the bonded labourer dies, the remaining debt is passed on to his children who are thus bonded to the landlord in the same way.)

  Father Joson impressed with his serious and thought-through approach to development in India, and his love for the suffering Dalits was very evident. The Pragati Social Service Society (PSSS) concentrated much of their effort on the formation of self-help groups in villages and slum areas, with the main aim of empowering women and girls in those communities. Among other things, these self-help groups set up initiatives to pool their savings and provide loans so as to help people avoid falling into inescapable debt. They also ran Balawadies (nursery schools), aimed at encouraging children into education. And it was in these Balawadies that we had begun to work with PSSS in 2004 in order to serve Mary’s Meals to the poorest young children. Before long we also started to provide meals in little ‘non-formal’ schools being set up by PSSS in slums and villages, so that working children could for the first time, benefit from an education. Five years later, in November 2009, I once again travelled to northern India by train with Father Joson, to revisit these non-formal schools and to help plan the support of new ones.

  In a village in Haryana, we visited a small cluster of homes made out of plastic and cardboard in a place known simply as Slum Area Sector 7. Maybe the people who lived here had never given it a proper name because they had no legal rights and could be moved on at any time by developers. This had happened to them four years previously and nice new houses now stood where they had once lived in huts. Among their pitiful homes, in a patch of waste land, a sheet of tarpaulin had been suspended between four poles and underneath a teacher was introducing a little huddle of children to the Hindi alphabet. A circle of curious parents looked on. Ten-year-old Biba arrived late, carrying her baby sister. She had been working all morning in one of the ‘rich people’s houses’, she told us. She would return there that evening to continue working, but meanwhile she was looking after her sister while her mum continued to work. I noticed a young woman standing near us, transfixed by the sight of her child learning to write, and I asked her why she had never before thought of sending her daughter to school. She looked at me as if I was mad and eventually answered, ‘Why would we? We are poor.’

  Under the tarpaulin sheet the teacher was doing an admirable job of keeping order, given that sitting still and reciting the alphabet for hours was a new experience for these children. Suddenly, though, the children leapt up, screaming with delight, and despite the teacher’s protestations they raced off down the path leading back towards the main road. Eventually I realized that they had sprinted to meet their lunch, which was arriving in metal pots carried on a pedal rickshaw (lunch here was cooked at a nearby orphanage). Soon the children were back sitting in orderly rows as rice, vegetable sauce and chapattis were dished out to them. Before she began eating herself, I noticed our friend Biba tearing her chapatti up and feeding small bits of it to her gurgling baby sister. Silence descended as many little hands scooped up every last morsel of food served to them. Before the lessons resumed, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that one of the fathers, who had been watching earlier, was sitting with his boy and was painstakingly copying out the alphabet letters from his textbook; his first attempts to write taken under the proud gaze of his young son.

  When we arrived at another centre in Ghaziabad, near Delhi, a high-caste Hindu lady and a Catholic nun were trying to teach the alphabet to around thirty Muslim c
hildren crowded into a tiny dark room. Three world religions, in a nation scarred by bitter sectarian divides, were brought together in their desire to see the hungry child fed and educated. When we had recently opened this centre, the children had come straight from their work as rag pickers, sometimes with huge sacks of putrid garbage over their shoulders, attracted by the hot meals on offer. Some of the young boys in the little class were street performers and monkey charmers, and for a little while they showed us their tricks. Ten-year-old Saroja then arrived with a broad grin, and explained she had been working in rubbish ‘since before the sun rose this morning’. Her friend Moni told us that she looked after the family’s goats and how one was stolen by a man on a motorbike the previous day.

  ‘I screamed but no one came to help me,’ she said indignantly.

  From there we travelled into the countryside of Uttar Pradesh, and as we went we passed more children working among the sugar cane. We were welcomed into a little mud-hut village, which had been home for forty years to a Bangladeshi refugee community. Every year the village was flooded. The previous year the entire community had lived for one month on a nearby canal embankment until the waters subsided. I asked them if they ever thought of moving and in reply they asked me ‘But where could we go?’ They had no electricity and one handpump served the whole village. Here our little centre was operating under a thatched ‘lean-to’ shelter adjoining someone’s house. The children sat in a circle in the village courtyard and it began to rain gently as the food was being served to them. Chitaranjan Khan, one of the older men, who could still remember life in Bangladesh before they fled, told me proudly that his three daughters ‘had grown wings’ in our little centre and had now moved on to mainstream schools nearby.